What's Wrong With Cinderella?

By Peggy Orenstein

Published: December 24, 2006

I finally came unhinged in the dentist's office -- one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games -- where I'd taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I'd held my tongue. I'd smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with ''Hi, Princess''; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her ''princess meal''; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, ''I bet I know your favorite color'' and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist's Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, ''Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?'' I lost it.

''Oh, for God's sake,'' I snapped. ''Do you have a princess drill, too?''

She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.

''Come on!'' I continued, my voice rising. ''It's 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?''

My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. ''Why are you so mad, Mama?'' she asked. ''What's wrong with princesses?''

Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a ''trend'' among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. ''Princess,'' as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls' franchise on the planet.

Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own ''world of girl'' line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home d?r and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Shortly before that, Mary Drolet, a Chicago-area mother and former Claire's and Montgomery Ward executive, opened Club Libby Lu, now a chain of mall stores based largely in the suburbs in which girls ages 4 to 12 can shop for ''Princess Phones'' covered in faux fur and attend ''Princess-Makeover Birthday Parties.'' Saks bought Club Libby Lu in 2003 for $12 million and has since expanded it to 87 outlets; by 2005, with only scant local advertising, revenues hovered around the $46 million mark, a 53 percent jump from the previous year. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.

Even Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed adventurer, has ascended to the throne: in 2004, after a two-part episode in which she turns into a ''true princess,'' the Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer-products division released a satin-gowned ''Magic Hair Fairytale Dora,'' with hair that grows or shortens when her crown is touched. Among other phrases the bilingual doll utters: ''V?nos! Let's go to fairy-tale land!'' and ''Will you brush my hair?''

As a feminist mother -- not to mention a nostalgic product of the Grranimals era -- I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture that has risen around it. What happened to William wanting a doll and not dressing your cat in an apron? Whither Marlo Thomas? I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they'd never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble ''So This Is Love'' or insist on being called Snow White. I wonder if they'd concede so readily to sons who begged for combat fatigues and mock AK-47s.

More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom -- something I'm convinced she does largely to torture me -- I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I've spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls' well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters' mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn't matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?

On the other hand, maybe I'm still surfing a washed-out second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication that girls can embrace their predilection for pink without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long last, they can ''have it all.'' Or maybe it is even less complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to know, what's wrong with that?

The rise of the Disney princesses reads like a fairy tale itself, with Andy Mooney, a former Nike executive, playing the part of prince, riding into the company on a metaphoric white horse in January 2000 to save a consumer-products division whose sales were dropping by as much as 30 percent a year. Both overstretched and underfocused, the division had triggered price wars by granting multiple licenses for core products (say, Winnie-the-Pooh undies) while ignoring the potential of new media. What's more, Disney films like ''A Bug's Life'' in 1998 had yielded few merchandising opportunities -- what child wants to snuggle up with an ant?